


never believed we'd grow up like this

by Cafelesbian



Series: tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Prequel, really just 7k words of steve being a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 12:15:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19887613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cafelesbian/pseuds/Cafelesbian
Summary: Tell me how to breathe inprequel in which Steve, for four years, tries and fails to cope with losing Bucky.





	never believed we'd grow up like this

**Author's Note:**

> :) Hey everyone you asked for one shots so here is a one shot
> 
> title is from Us by James Bay! every work thus far in this series is from that song
> 
> little warning for homophobic language and behavior at the beginning
> 
> If this is your first time at this joint you could read this first bc it is a prequel but I suggest you hop on over to part one and you will have a little more appreciation for some of the stuff that's mentioned but you do you! you aren't missing that much in terms of stuff u need to know

_July, 2009_

“So,” Steve says to Bucky, “I think I found a place.”

They’re on Bucky’s couch. They were watching a movie, but ten minutes in, Bucky started touching his thigh; gently, at first, like an accident, and then squeezing, smirking while Steve pretended to be focused on _The Princess Bride,_ until he became unbearably hard and turned to grab Bucky and hoist him up to straddle his waist and kiss him while Bucky grinned, utterly self-satisfied. He almost forgot, distracted by the thrill of having Bucky’s house to themselves for the night, but the second he remembered he had to share it.

Bucky stops kissing him. “What?” he says, and smacks Steve’s shoulder lightly. “You asshole, you didn’t lead with that?”

Steve grins. “Sorry, baby, I forgot.” He pauses. “It’s Sam’s cousin. He’s got a cheap place in Bushwick that he rents out, and Sam says he’d probably let us rent it in a couple weeks.”

Bucky blinks a few times, like he’s trying to be sure Steve is serious. “Oh, my god,” he says, and kisses Steve quickly, smiling through it. “Oh, my god.”

“Yep.” Steve laughs, nuzzling his nose against Bucky’s momentarily. “We can go see it in a few weeks, I think.”

Bucky shakes his head, giddy with elation. “I love you,” he says, giggling on the words.

“I love you more,” Steve answers, warmth filling him to the brim, overflowing him, turning his blood to liquid gold, and then Bucky kisses him again, deep enough that their laughter becomes shared, deep enough that Steve can taste his whole future, and it’s the sweetest flavor in the world. He lays back, pulling Bucky down with him so Bucky’s full weight rests on his chest, and love makes him dizzy.

They don’t hear the door open over the movie, and the murmured, muffled sounds of laughter and moaning and the clumsy grasping at each other’s clothes, but they hear what comes next.

“What the fuck.”

Steve’s heart stops, constricted by a panic he’s never felt before. He bolts up, and Bucky is already off of him, tugging his tee shirt back down, fumbling with the button on his jeans all while he slides off of Steve on the couch. He’s gone pale, a sheet of fear thrown over his face that Steve’s never seen on him in twelve years.

“Dad,” he stammers, and his voice has gone high. Steve, without breathing, staggers to his feet and fixes his clothes and looks, panicked, between them.

He’s silent, staring at Bucky and then at Steve and then at Bucky again, his face blank. It’s a silence that rips apart the world, that must have fallen over all of New York in its sheer size. “How long?” he says finally, his voice quiet in a way that ripples the air and pulls the molecules apart.

Bucky shakes his head. “It’s not…only a few…a few weeks…”

“Bullshit,” George snarls. “Don’t lie to me. How long?”

Bucky is still gasping. “Three…three years,” he finally whispers, and another cold shot of fear runs up Steve’s spine.

“You did this,” he says to Steve. The hatred in his voice throws Steve off, diamond hard and unmistakable from this man who he’s known since he was six, who told him his art was phenomenal and bought him birthday presents and talked about soccer with him.

“Mr. Barnes,” Steve begins shakily, “we can—just let us—”

“No,” he snaps, and Steve shuts the fuck up. He looks back to Bucky, who looks almost porcelain, wide, glazed eyes and flushed cheeks and lips parted but not saying anything. “I told your mother, I knew you were a fag, but she never listened—”

“Dad,” Bucky pleads, and his voice breaks, “Dad, just…just listen for a minute—”

Without another word, George turns away and vanishes into his room.

Bucky swings around and grabs his shoulder, squeezing. “Steve,” He says, his eyes huge, his voice panic-stricken, “go, go now, I’ll call you, I promise—”

And Steve touches Bucky’s trembling hand with one hand and his waist with the other. “No fucking way, Buck,” he says, and throws an urgent glance behind him.

Bucky is shaking his head, crying now, which punctures a dull ache into Steve’s chest. “No, you don’t—he’s gonna _freak—”_

“Yeah, exactly, so I’m not fucking _leaving—”_

“No, I’m—I’m his kid, he isn’t—he’s not gonna do anything too bad to me—”

“Bucky,” Steve catches his face with both hands. “Buck, let’s just go, now, we can—we can go to Nat’s, or Sam’s, or a fucking hotel, let’s just run—”

But then he’s back, his footsteps heavy, and Bucky flinches, and he looks unrecognizable with fear, so Steve wraps an arm around him and whispers, quickly, “Baby, I’m staying, it’s gonna be fine. End of the line, okay?”

But then he’s back. They jump apart, and Steve opens his mouth to say god-knows-what, but then he sees George is holding a gun, a fucking _gun._

And the only thing Steve can make his body do is get in front of Bucky.

“Dad, please, it’s me, it’s just me, I’m not… Please, please, _please_ …” Bucky has never sounded so scared. The words tangle in his throat, saturated in panic, too quiet to materialize the way they need to so they don’t even land. It becomes more frantic. “Please, don’t…don’t… Just listen, please—” Steve doesn’t realize it at first, but Bucky has reached forward for his hand, and he took it with both of his.

He raises the pistol. There’s a way that the world slows down, when a gun is pointed at you. Steve doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes, doesn’t see anything, just what’s about to happen if he doesn’t move, but he can’t.

Bucky screams, hysterical, _“Steve, go, fucking GO!”_

Steve swings around to stare at Bucky. He’s still squeezing Bucky’s hand between his, the pulse between them the only moving thing in the room.

There are moments in life that stretch on forever, that are so full and thick with emotion that they linger for the rest of time even if the world continues to spin. The moment they lock eyes is one of those. Steve has never felt terror so thick it tinted the world in blood, so thick it turned his breath to razors in his throat, so thick it smashed his insides to bits, but he feels it now and he sees it, reflected back at him on Bucky’s face. He’s still talking, still saying go, go, go, get out, PLEASE, but Steve somehow can’t hear it.

The gun clicks; he’s done something with it, and his finger trembles on the pistol.

So Steve drops Bucky’s hand and shoves the door open.

He waits there. He doesn’t know how long. Time ceases to exist, becomes the flicker of terror waning and swelling in the air, melts into the muffled, terrified, furious sounds he hears behind the door, words he can’t make out, a scream that belongs to Bucky that makes him throw his weight against the door and weep.

A neighbor yells at him. He doesn’t care.

At some point, Steve’s dad shows up. “Steve,” he says, worried, “C’mon, it’s fine, you can see Bucky in the morning, if it’s a fight, you guys will work it out—”

He doesn’t know, and Steve can’t tell him, can’t scream at the top of his lungs what’s happening because his parents are the same, so he goes numb with shock and lets his dad put an arm around his shoulder and lead him home.

He thought it would be the last time he saw Bucky for a few days.

It never, ever crossed his mind that it would be the last time he’d see Bucky at all.

***

Bucky doesn’t call him the next day.

Steve throws up four times. His parents try to ask, but he can’t say anything, can’t even mumble a lie, and his mom begs him to go to the hospital because she thinks he’s gotten some kind of virus and it’s spread to his brain, but he doesn’t.

Two days go by, and three. He calls Bucky until it stops ringing and starts going straight to voicemail. He texts him two hundred messages. Everything goes unanswered.

He stays, losing his mind with fear, staring at Bucky’s house.

No one comes out.

***

On the fourth day, he rings the bell.

He doesn’t think about it at all, has no idea what he’s going to say to anyone who isn’t Bucky who answers it. He needs to know what’s happening.

Bucky’s mom answers. She looks surprised to see him, like she didn’t think he’d have the audacity or she forgot he existed outside of her son, and then she purses her lips. “He isn’t here,” she says coldly.

“Where… what…?” Steve hears himself stammer.

“I want you to leave.”

“Just… he’s…” _Please tell me he’s safe, tell me he’s okay_ , Steve is trying to say, but he can’t remember any of the words.

“He’s fine. But you’re never going to see him again.” She stares at him, blinking, then shakes her head. “Don’t come back here.” And she closes the door, and leaves Steve blinking and shivering and staring at nothing and waiting for Bucky to appear.

***

Nat and Sam come that day. Steve’s mom lets them in. From his room, Steve can hear her telling them, “He isn’t feeling well, I think he had a fight with Bucky, maybe? But he’d love to have you.”

“Where,” Nat begins, shoving open his door, “the hell have you been?”

And Steve blinks slowly. He’d forgotten anyone but Bucky existed.

“Steve,” Sam says carefully, “you look like shit. Did you guys…” he drops his voice. “Neither of us have heard from you or Bucky. Did you break up?”

Steve finally says, voice cracking, “He’s gone.”

Sam and Nat exchange an alarmed look. “What?” she says, kneeling next to him.

He tells them, sobbing through it, terror wracking him all over again. “I don’t know where… They won’t open the door… He isn’t answering anything…”

And they hug him and rub his shoulders and tell him it’s gonna be okay, that Bucky’s probably at his grandparents for a few days until things cool off, that Nat will go over there and ask and he’ll know, that they’re both there and will help them. Steve doesn’t really hear them. They stay for a long time, and when they’re gone, Steve isn’t sure they were ever there.

***

On the sixth day, his parents find out.

Steve is in his room again, staring out the window. The view is starting to hurt his head, starting to swim in some surreal, sickening haze, but he can’t look away, because Bucky might come back and he has to be there.

His mom knocks on the door, and then comes in. She stares at him, her face hard, and Steve knows.

He can’t find the energy to panic.

“Winifred just came by,” she finally says, and looks down. Steve doesn’t say anything. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back against the wall.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Steve finally answers. His voice is raspy from crying and disuse. “She isn’t lying.”

There’s silence, a tunnel of silence, dark and endless and nauseating. Steve finally breaks it.

“Did she… Do you know where he is?”

His mom stares down. “You have thirty minutes to pack and go,” she finally says. “I don’t care where. But you can’t live here anymore.”

That gets him to sit up. “What?” And the panic comes, belated and violent. “Mom… mom, c’mon, it’s not… mom. Mom, please. You can’t be serious.”

“Thirty minutes,” she says, “I set the timer on the microwave.” And she goes downstairs without looking at him.

For eight of those thirty minutes, Steve stares at the door and tries to work out what just happened. Then, panic curdling in his blood, he scrambles for his phone and dials Sam with shaking hands.

“I’m coming over, Steve,” Sam tells him firmly, as Steve gasps through an explanation. “You can stay at my place.”

So in one week, Steve loses his home and his house.

***

The realization that Bucky is truly, irreparably gone is slow and brutal and breaks Steve down to ragged bits.

He thinks, for a long time, that he’ll be back. He’ll call him, he’ll text him, he’ll show up at Nat’s or Sam’s, a little shaken but _alive_ , and Steve will open his arms and Bucky will fall into them and they’ll both cry but they’ll have each other, and everything will resolve itself from there.

Weeks go by, weeks where Steve hovers around his and Bucky’s block — _old block, former block_ — and just waits. Nothing happens. He sees his parents a few times, and they ignore him and he ignores them. Nat comes, sometimes, waits with him, desperation in her every move.

Bucky’s mom threatens to call the cops after a few weeks. Steve ignores her. She calls them, and a smug, unsympathetic guy named Brock tells him, enjoying the look on his face, not to come back or there will be a fine and an arrest.

So stunned, Steve doesn’t.

He gets drunk that night. Steve’s a big guy, so really drunk for him takes a while, but he shoves his very obviously fake ID across a table at a bodega and buys cheap vodka and sits on the rocks at Brooklyn Bridge Park, thinking about how a few weeks ago, he’d sat here with Bucky, snuggled against him, and listened to him read poetry he had written, words that were so beautiful that Steve couldn’t believe someone had strung them together in that order, couldn’t believe he had the privilege to love that someone.

He drinks until he gets sick in the water. He drinks more after that. He drinks until all the lights bleed into one stream of sickening white. He drinks until he forgets his name.

He doesn’t forget Bucky’s. In fact, it’s the only thing his brain can muster.

_Bucky, Bucky, BUCKY._

When he comes back, he’s kneeling in the grass, sobbing into his hands.

That becomes the routine for a while. Go out, drink until he can’t see straight, fall asleep thinking about Bucky, the grief so heavy he doesn’t know how it doesn’t pull him to the Earth’s core. Sam and Nat watch it helplessly. He’s sure not to stumble home obviously wasted, but they know what’s happening.

Since he was six years old, his life has been defined by Bucky, shaped so it clicked perfectly, beautifully with his. Bucky is his best friend, his safe place, his home more than any place or person. Bucky, who knew every crevice of Steve, every curve of his body and thought that ran through his head. Bucky, who’s hand he has held since he was so little that as they grew up, they shaped around each other. Bucky, who, when Steve was little, had stayed next to him, reading and talking and playing go fish when his asthma had been too bad for him to get up. Bucky, who he’d teased relentlessly when he hit his middle school growth spurt and gotten taller than him. Bucky, who held ice packs against his face when he got into impulsive fights, who always handed money to homeless people on the street even though he had nothing, who refused to kill spiders, who liked coffee more than tea, who got Steve a beautiful, monogrammed set of paintbrushes that he certainly couldn’t afford for his birthday, who always smelled like lavender.

Bucky, who’s gone now.

So now his life is defined by Bucky’s absence, by all the caverns it left in and around Steve. It’s all he thinks about, obsessively. He wakes up gasping and choked with conviction that something horrible is happening to Bucky, terrified at where he is, at whether or not he’s okay, at if he’s even alive.

“Steve,” Sam says to him softly, one day when he catches him calling Bucky’s phone again. “You should talk to someone about this. You aren’t… This is too much for you to handle, alone, and you know me and my family and Nat are always here, but you aren’t okay.”

Steve nods, and forgets it that night.

***

Steve doesn’t remember most of his high school academics, but there was a lesson in AP world history that is cemented in his consciousness.

They’d been talking about Greek myths, because their teacher had been obsessed with them. That day, it was Plato’s origin of love. The way it goes, at the beginning of time, there were double the souls in one body; two faces, four arms and legs. They were powerful, the way you’d expect people to be if they emerged into existence with their soulmate tied to them. Steve, at this point, started to draw a little cartoon in the corner of Bucky’s paper of what the two of them would look like in this scenario, until their teacher said, “Something to share, Steve?” and Bucky kicked his shin.

So as the myth goes, they were too powerful, and Zeus didn’t like that, so he cut them in half. The pain, as it goes, was excruciating. And after that, people were scoured, fated to search for their severed piece until they found them and clung on, terrified of losing one another again. So profound was this closeness, so woven into one’s molecules that no matter how far across the earth the two parts had been scattered, when they found each other, they would know. 

“I actually like that one,” Bucky said after class, slipping his hand into Steve’s.

What Plato didn’t seem to understand was the pain of losing that part of you after you had already fitted yourselves back together. After your body knew the shape of the person who you have always been meant to fit against, after the wound has been stitched up so perfectly and for so long that you couldn’t remember what it had been like to stumble around Earth alone and unbalanced. That, Steve thinks, rivals the pain of feeling your body severed by electricity, of an entire world of people reduced to half of what they were, stupid and clumsy with two legs and one heart, the pulse too quiet by itself. A wound can be healed once, but cut open the same scar twice and it becomes harder to resew.

***

“Steve,” Sam says to him, ten days before he starts college, “you know, um…you can still have that place, if you want. The one my cousin owns.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and blinks. It’s too much for him to imagine moving or having an apartment, and more than that, the fact that the house that should have been his and Bucky’s continued to exist even after Bucky was gone feels horribly, sickeningly wrong.

Sam runs a hand through his hair. “Look,” he sighs, “you know my family loves you, and you’re welcome as long as you need. Just…if you want your own place, it’s yours. Jack hasn’t let anyone else rent it yet.”

And because he doesn’t want to impose on the Wilsons anymore, Steve moves.

***

Steve hates that apartment. 

Everything about it is mocking and tragic. _He isn’t here,_ fills it up until Steve wants to put his fist through a wall. He lays awake in a bed that feels too big and cold, and wakes up grasping at empty air. He stares at bare walls that he can’t make himself decorate, because he and Bucky were going to buy the posters and print the photos together. He cooks alone and finds himself crying, sometimes. He wakes up and forgets, and then remembers and feels like he’s been thrust underwater all over again. Sometimes, when he needs peace, he gives himself the memories; Bucky, sleeping against him in his bed, eyelashes fluttering, mumbling peacefully in his sleep. Bucky, kissing him on the beach, Bruce Springsteen playing somewhere in the background, the smell of the ocean filling their lungs. Bucky, laughing at Steve’s stupid jokes, the most beautiful sound in the world, pressing his face into Steve’s neck. If he imagines hard enough, he can forget that all of that is gone now, forget that he’s lying in a bed in a leering, horrible house that should have been full of more beautiful memories and joy.

What could have been, he learns, is just as tragic as what had once been.

***

Five months after, Bucky’s voicemail stops working.

Steve had been calling it, subconsciously, for the comfort. The disappointment grew duller every time, there but fading with his conviction that the other end was ever going to be anything new.

For a long time, he had called it because it was the only way he’d hear Bucky’s voice. He had been there when he’d recorded it, two years ago, doing some stupid dance to distract him, trying to make him laugh so he had to start over. Eventually, he’d given up, so in the recording, he can hear Bucky giggle while he tells the caller to leave a message.

Steve didn’t realize how heavily he’d leaned on that thirty-second recording.

He tries it again, and gets the automated message. He doesn’t realize he’s crying for a few moments.

There are things he has left of Bucky, shirts of his and all of the photos of them and little poems and letters he’d written Steve and he keeps them, all tucked neatly into one box that he opens when he gets drunk enough, that he can’t look at otherwise because the pain feels so huge that he thinks it might stop the world from turning. He checks on them, now, like they’ll be gone, too, like some cable company will pull them away.

On Bucky’s birthday, he calls the number again. Just in case there are miracles.

There aren’t.

***

He does drawings for tourists and rich teenagers in Central Park because he has nothing else to do, and Sam’s cousin needs his rent somehow. It’s so mundane and easy and empty that he doesn’t even remember, that he just checks out and lets the days bleed into each other, punctuated by nights when he’s tipsy or blackout drunk.

Steve can’t understand how time is still passing in a world where he doesn’t have Bucky Barnes next to him. He doesn’t want to acknowledge a world without Bucky but he doesn’t have a choice, so he goes on and working and existing even though focusing on anything else is utterly and brutally impossible. Time seems to be going by agonizingly slowly and impossibly fast; every day without Bucky drags, miserable, the hours that he spends in that apartment endless and torturous while Steve puts himself through imagining what should be, but when he steps back, the fact that months have passed seems utterly unimaginable.

In April, he meets Tony Stark. Tony, Steve thinks, much later, probably saved his life. He would’ve gone on like that until he gave himself alcohol poisoning or something worse, he’s sure, if Tony hadn’t walked by in his Armani suit and stopped for a drawing for his new girlfriend and seen, in ten seconds, the immovable misery in Steve’s face and given him a pity job.

The job is easy, graphics for SI’s events and announcements and commissions for work in their buildings. He sets Steve up with a swanky apartment and good benefits and great pay.

And Steve still feels so fucking miserable that he barely registers the changes.

***

_September, 2010_

“Steve,” Nat tells him, gently, “It’s been over a year. You should… You can go out with someone. It isn’t cheating.”

He kind of shrugs and goes back to drawing for his latest commission.

Natasha, though, is relentless. “Okay,” she says, “you’re coming out with me tonight. We’re going to a bar near NYU, it’ll be fun.”

He rolls his eyes and lights a cigarette. She looks appalled. “You smoke now?”

“Sometimes,” Steve says. She rubs her eyes.

Somehow, she gets him out that night. He sips a beer and stands next to her and listens to her trying to convince him to go buy someone a drink, and irritation tugs at him.

“I don’t want to date these people, Nat,” Steve tells her, faintly annoyed. He doesn’t say _I want Bucky,_ but she hears it anyway, and grimaces, then shakes it away.

Nat scans the bar, and then stops. A little smile comes over her face, the twitch of the corner of her mouth, intrigued. “Her,” Nat says, pointing. “She’s cute. Go say hi.”

Steve follows her finger. The girl in question is about their age, long, bouncy dark hair and intelligent dark eyes and red lipstick, talking animatedly and intently to a friend. Steve glances back at Nat; she’s still staring.

“I think,” Steve says, giving her a grin, “that I’m not the one who should go say hi.”

Nat rolls her eyes. “No way. We came here to find you someone—”

“You came her to find me someone,” Steve tells her, “I came here to drink.” Then he rolls his eyes. “You’ve been staring at her for half an hour. You go say hi. If I did it I think you might kill me.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Bullshit, you’re just avoiding—” But she cuts off, straightening up, because the girl has strutted over to them and is smiling.

“Hey,” the girl says, looking between them, and smirks a little. “You wanna dance?”

But she isn’t talking to Steve.

Nat looks uncharacteristically flustered. “Oh,” she says, and stares at Steve. “I… um…”

“She’d love to,” Steve says, nodding to the girl. “Right, Nat?”

Nat glances at him, a little guilty, but then grins like she’s just saved the world or found the holy grail or gotten asked to dance by a beautiful British girl. “Yeah,” she says finally, grinning, and sticks out a hand. “Natasha.”

The girl takes it, and smiles. “Peggy,” she replies.

Nat vanishes with her onto the floor, and Steve sips his beer and smiles after her.

When Nat tells him, two weeks later, that they’re dating, he grinds down the bitterness.

***

The first time he sleeps with someone is over a year after he lost Bucky.

He doesn’t remember the guy’s name. It’s his first real exhibit, this small, limited show at the Met, something for young, up and coming modern artists. He goes alone; Nat or Sam would have come, but he doesn’t want them there, doesn’t want them to see people paying fifty thousand dollars for some fucking painting he’d done.

People like him, he knows, because he’s a good artist but he isn’t traditional. He’s only twenty, he’s got no training, and he comes from nothing. Rich people think it’s exotic and different and authentic, that some nobody from Bay Ridge could claw his way into the art world. By supporting people like Steve, they think, they’re supporting the American Dream.

Or maybe they just like his fucking paintings. He doesn’t think about it much, because it all happens so fucking fast that he can’t theorize, all he can do is look around and wonder how it all happened this way.

The guy he goes home with is shorter than him, with short feathery brown hair and light blue eyes and dimples. If Steve doesn’t focus, he almost looks like Bucky. He starts talking to Steve in the middle of the floor, introducing himself as some art curator or manager or something business related and telling him his work is just brilliant, just astonishing, and the next thing Steve knows they’re back at his place, kissing.

They fuck quickly on his bed, Steve thrusting into him, and everything is purely physical. 

He thinks about Bucky, closes his eyes and thinks about how, when they’d had sex, he understood why people called it making love, understood why people treated it like something sacred. He thinks about how they always laughed during sex. He thinks about the excitement, the love, the trust, that swelled and warmed the air around them. He thinks about how Bucky got turned on when Steve pulled his hair a little, or told him what to do, or said things like _so good for me, baby,_ how Bucky _trusted_ him with that, with all of it, how he’d held onto that trust and let it lead everything they did. He thinks about how once, Bucky and kissed his neck and giggled that it was ridiculous that they were each only gonna have sex with one person their entire life, and Steve had smirked and said he wouldn’t want it any other way. He thinks about how they would hold onto each other after, listening to the sound of each other’s breathing, pressing light kisses and tracing fingers over bare skin.

When they’re done, the guy kisses him and smiles and asks if he’s hungry. Steve croaks out some excuse about having to be up early the next day.

“Don’t worry, Rogers. I’m not trying to play house.” He dresses, quick and un-self conscious. “That was fun, though. Gimme a call if you ever wanna do it again.”

When he’s gone, Steve sobs himself breathless, guilt and grief carving him open, leaving him hollow.

***

It becomes almost an addiction, soon.

Addiction, actually, is the wrong word. It becomes something like a challenge. Maybe the next person will stop him feeling empty, or the next, or the next, and on and on.

The people don’t matter. Steve hates himself for that. They come and go so fast that it makes his head spin, so fast that it blurs together, one one night stand after another, all of them making him a little sicker with himself than the last.

None of them are Bucky. None of them are close.

***

The morning after one of these one night stands, someone knocks on the door.

It’s a girl, this time. Steve doesn’t know her name either. She’s already awake, dressed in his kitchen, and she gets to the door before he does. He’s still stumbling on a brutal hangover, trying to shake his head clear, and when the girl makes a shocked noise he looks up.

Tony is standing there, looking unimpressed. “Hi,” he says to the girl, “so sorry to interrupt. Any chance I could talk to Steve, here, for a bit?”

“Of course,” she says, all star struck, and then turns around and smiles. “Call me, okay?” 

Steve nods. That call will never be made. She shoves on shoes and disappears into the hallway. Steve feels a dull, terrible relief that she’s gone.

“What are you doing here?” he says tiredly to Tony. 

Tony doesn’t answer. He looks around the apartment, grimacing. It’s a company condo, a pretty, furnished house that Steve got from SI for free that somehow hurts almost as much to live in as the last place, only it’s considerably more comfortable. There’s an empty bottle of vodka on the coffee table, a few unwashed dishes in the sink, a couple of shirts strewn around. Steve leans, self-consciously, against the wall.

“You aren’t at work,” Tony finally says pointedly. Steve blinks.

“You told me that I can work from home, sometimes.”

“And clearly, you’re working hard here” —Steve bites back an eye roll— “but I took a gander putting a twenty-year-old in charge of the aesthetics, and you need to be there sometimes, if only for appearances.”

“Okay.” Steve shuts his eyes. He’s tired, too fucking tired for this conversation, and his head is pounding and he wants to shower the scent of the girl’s perfume off. “So I’ll come in.”

Tony stares at him, then nods. “Okay, kid.” He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “Get up, take a shower. We’re going for a walk.”

Steve blinks; the light still hurts. “Sorry?”

“Steve,” Tony sighs, and perches himself on Steve’s couch. “You need to pull yourself together. Now.”

Steve glares at him, sudden anger whirring alive in his chest. “You don’t know me,” he snaps, “you can’t tell me—”

“I know,” Tony interrupts, raising a hand, “that you aren’t old enough to be drinking, let alone drinking this much. I know that you certainly aren’t old enough to have a nicotine addiction—

“So fire me,” Steve snaps. He doesn’t care, he _doesn’t care_ anymore what happens.

Tony holds his gaze. “No.”

“Why?” Steve growls, and stretches his arms in front of himself, irritated. “You don’t owe me anything—”

“I also know that you’re fucking miserable, kid, and the world hasn’t given you a break.” Tony’s voice has softened. “Steve. You’re insanely talented. You’re a good person. You’ve had a shit last year, probably more than that. But your future doesn’t have to be drinking and lung cancer and sleeping with everything that moves. But you gotta make an effort.”

And something about that hurts, twists into his chest and pries the tightness free. Steve is sobbing, suddenly, breathless gasps of air, crying harder than he has in months. It takes so much out of him that he hits the ground.

And Tony kneels awkwardly next to him and pats his shoulder and says “Alright, kid, it’s all gonna be okay.”

Steve tells him that day. About Bucky, about the sleeping around and drinking, about everything. And Tony, unsure of how to comfort him, squeezes his shoulder and tells him he’s here for him, that it will all work out.

Steve nods, and doesn’t believe him.

***

So he pulls himself together. Kind of.

On the outside, at least. He keeps his apartment clean. He throws himself into working; he’s getting commission after commission, getting offers for installations and wall art and wine labels and the cover of the _New Yorker_ , and he accepts them all. Somehow, his bank account has six figures, which he can’t figure out. He smokes less and stops getting drunk alone. He works more and more, spends full nights on paintings, and people eat it up.

He dates someone for the first time two years after he saw Bucky last, a sweet, handsome guy named Gabe who’s also an artist. Gabe is smart; he’s Steve’s age, and he paints sets for Broadway shows, and they meet at an award show where they’re both getting honored, and when Gabe asks him to dinner Steve is so surprised that he says yes.

Gabe is nice, and funny, and charming. Steve likes talking to him over dinner, enjoys his company enough, and when Gabe kisses him there’s nothing there but he kisses him back because maybe it will come. They go out again, and sleep together. There’s nothing there either, but at least he knows his name, at least he didn’t meet him wasted and knowing he was never going to see him again.

They don’t last five weeks, because Gabe sleeps over one day, and when Steve is in the kitchen Gabe joins him, quietly, and leans against the wall.

“I think,” he says carefully, “that this isn’t working.”

It surprises Steve. Not panic, not despair, only surprise. “Why?” he asks, blinking.

“You’re in love with someone else,” Gabe says, very matter of fact, very calm. “And that’s okay.”

Steve blinks, too confused to be guilty. For a moment, hope rises in his chest, absurdly selfish, wildly irrational hope, that somehow he’s found Bucky, he knows him… 

“Cute brunette guy?” Gabe goes on, with a sad smile. “One arm? Photos of him under your bed?”

The hope hardens and shatters.

“I dropped my phone,” Gabe explains, grimacing, “and found them. I didn’t look, but…” He trails off, then clears his throat. “It makes sense.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, suddenly exhausted. He doesn’t know what else to say. 

Gabe nods, thrusting his hands into his pocket. “He an ex?” Gabe asks, awkwardly, after a moment. 

Steve runs a hand through his hair. He hates thinking of Bucky as an _ex. Ex_ suggests they hadn’t loved each other enough to make it work, hadn’t fought hard enough, that it had been their fault they weren’t together anymore.

“Kind of,” Steve says finally. When Gabe raises an eyebrow, he goes on, “Parents didn’t like us together.”

“Ah,” Gabe says, and nods slowly. “Guess I should’ve known,” he says, after a moment. “Your art… that one painting of the hands and the snapped string… that for him?”

His throat suddenly growing very thick, Steve says “Yeah.”

He sighs, and pats Steve on the shoulder, grabbing his jacket off the back of Steve’s chairs. “I hope you find him again, Steve.”

When Gabe leaves, Steve cries over Bucky again.

***

His mom dies.

He gets the call in a cab home from an exhibit, one of his first ones on his own. “I’m the estate lawyer for Sarah Rogers,” the man on the phone says, and Steve startles. “I’m so sorry, but she passed away today.”

The rain slams the window, splitting on the glass. Steve stares at it. He feels like that, like splintered raindrops.

“How?” he finally says.

“She had a heart attack.” The man clears his throat. “She didn’t, um… I thought you would want to know. However, um, she didn’t… Well, you weren’t left anything…”

Steve hangs up.

He hasn’t seen her in two and a half years. The last thing she said to him was _I don’t want a faggot as a son_. Hatred bubbles, mixed with grief, too deep for him to grasp, the numbness surrounding it, thick and impermeable.

He smokes again that night, and doesn’t cry. He stands under that bodega awning, rain imprinting itself into the fabric above him, dull and relentless. He lights cigarettes off of each other until his hands shake.

He wants Bucky.

***

Steve buys the penthouse almost three years after he last saw Bucky. Steve now has seven figures in his bank account, money from working for Tony and getting paid to do pieces for movies and commissions for billionaires and huge exhibits. It stuns him, thinking of himself as a millionaire. He hates it a little, hates that he’s become the people he and Bucky had once mocked relentlessly, so he tries to do the right thing with it. He buys food and gifts for his friends, he donates, he always gives cash to people who beg on the street or the subway. Still, it’s a strange way to live, and buying himself a penthouse feels insane, but Nat and Sam and Tony all tell him to go for it, so he does.

It’s big and empty and lonely. It feels impersonal, like a hotel room, like a pre-designed space in an advertisement. It’s beautiful, and Steve barely registers living there.

In April, 2012, he’s at a party for Tony. He doesn’t want to be, but it’s a big celebration of SI’s thirtieth year and he owes him showing up, so he leans against the wall, sipping a gin and tonic and trying to calculate when it’s appropriate to leave. Some girl is flirting with him, a pretty blonde with a high voice and a margarita who he’s sure is lovely but who he can’t focus on right now, and the moment she leaves he forgets she was ever there.

“That,” says someone next to him, “must be the real payment.”

Steve turns, taken aback, then recoils. Alexander Pierce is leaning against the bar next to him, smirking. Steve met him a few months before when he was a sponsor on an exhibit Steve had done, but he doesn’t really know him, and that comment sets him on edge, astonishing him.

“Oh,” is all Steve says, and sips his drink.

“Come on,” he says, and smiles. “Girl who looks like that falling all over you? Makes me wish I became an artist. She’s gotta be an animal in bed.” Steve blanches, revolted; Alexander, he thinks, is married, and in his sixties, and Steve has no idea how to react to this without getting into an ugly fight in the middle of Tony Stark’s party.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Alexander goes on, catching Steve’s disgust, “I love my wife. And I’ve got two daughters.” Steve doesn’t know if that’s supposed to excuse it or explain it or what. “But god, do I miss that.”

“Um,” Steve says, too tired and too close to drunk to say anything else. Alexander doesn’t seem to register.

“I’ve got somewhere to be,” Alexander says, and smirks again. “Enjoy her, Rogers.” Steve recoils a little, but doesn’t make it obvious. He’s too tired to argue with this guy. Alexander leaves, to go see whoever he has to see at eleven on a Wednesday night, and Steve downs the rest of his drink.

“Alexander Pierce,” Steve announces later, to Tony, “is a world-class dick.”

Tony shrugs, resigned. “Yeah, well. All bankers are. Relax, Steve, he’s not so bad, he’s never hurt anyone. He’s harmless.”

***

He stops smoking and sleeping around and drinking all the time. It doesn’t help anymore, never helped in the first place. Instead, he works. He’s cranking out three paintings a week, big ones, impressive ones that sell for more money than he had ever imagined in his life, and twenty or thirty sketches a week, and whatever commissions or galleries he’s getting. He paints until he's near delirious with exhaustion and passes out and sleeps enough to paint for another fourteen hours. Working is the only thing, now, that makes him feel anything but numb. He doesn’t work for Tony anymore, but he sees him all the time, does art for him on occasion, but now it’s mainly galleries and installations and movie pieces.

He still thinks about Bucky every waking moment. He has learned how to live with it. It is amazing what the human body can absorb and carry with it, pain so terrible that can become as much a part of you as your heart and lungs.

Steve doesn’t know how much longer he can go on like this.

***

On November fourth, 2012, Steve walks home from a gallery. Even though it’s freezing, even though he’s exhausted and out of it, even though he lives a mile away.

He spends the rest of his life being grateful he did.

**Author's Note:**

> so i'm posting this now because i WILL be posting ch 1 of the sequel tomorrow ! this is a little warm up get ready!! as always I'm cafelesbian on tumblr for anything you could ever need i really missed posting in this universe so i'm VERY excited to get started on it :) Cia edited this and she's amazing btw


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